Wikipedia’s problem is finally being realised, it teams of editors are “young white western males with a slight personality defect” and there are simply not enough women working at the place. Guardian feature writer Anne Perkins said that Wikipedia’s editors are single and childless and most of them are actually small boys who are getting bullied at school.

A recent survey of Wikipedians showed that the average age of them 25.22 years, young enough to know nothing but old enough to think they are gods gift to intellect. Half of the respondents are younger than 22 years. The most frequent age that can be observed within the respondents is 18 years. So that means a quarter of them are younger than 18 years old and another quarter are between 18 and 22, a further 25 quarter are between 22 and 30. Only the last quarter are between the ages of 30 and 85 years old which is the age you actually know anything.

Contributors show a substantially larger share of males than readers. Among respondents only 12.64 per cent of contributors are female. Wikipedia acknowledges that it suffers from a lack of women editors however it has been unable to do anything about it and in 2013 any attempt within Wikipedia was abandoned.

As a result if you compare the coverage of female porn stars, where a page that went up first in 2004 has been edited over 3,000 times by more than a hundred volunteers determined to make it as copiously referenced as possible with that of a page about women writers you see the effect of the gender and age bias.

However it is not an issue about women and technology. Women have come to outnumber men in some social media domains. They use social network sites such as Facebook more often and more actively than men and female users predominate on Twitter, Yelp, and the online pinboard Pinterest.

Men hang out in Reddit, a social news website known for its sometimes-misogynistic content and LinkedIn has attracted almost twice as many males as females. LinkedIn claims that this is because men are better at professional networking than women. What is more likely is that women do not hang out in places where there are a higher percentage of men being misogynistic socially retarded tossers – which is why they ignore Wikipedia in droves.

The Wikipedia Foundation is finding itself dealing with a revolt of its German editors who are furious at the introduction of the Media Viewer software to the German Wikipedia.

A community of editors that work on that version voted to disable it in what could be a deeper and widening rift between the offices in San Francisco and the global community wikipedia.

According to Wikipediocracy the happy days where the Foundation worked well with its foreign editors is starting to come to an end.

For a while now people have been complaining that there was a steep learning curve needed to add content. So the WMF began using its newly donated millions to create a method and eventually introducing the Visual Editor (VE).

The software was buggy, causing all sorts of problems to pages it was used on. The editor was also unable to add or edit the many templates found on almost every Wikipedia article. With the sort of management, flare that Wackypedia displays at times it imposed VE on the volunteer against its will.

While everyone was screaming to switch the programme off, Wackypedia management was digging in its toes.

Then a Wikipedia admin changed the javascript file for the site to override the developers, and only then did the developers finally back down and make it an opt-in tool. It seemed, for a time, that the WMF had given up on forcing people to do things until it developed another new feature to prevent the community from overriding them in the future called “superprotection”.

The Germans revolted and a German administrator edited the javascript file for the site in order to disable the feature. A WMF representative reverted the change and there was an edit war.

This time the “superprotection” extension was added to prevent the administrators from editing the interface page. This was bypassed by deleting the page and creating a new one with their preferred version. The developers in San Francisco scrambled to fix the extension to prevent deletion as well, and so finally their preferred version stands.

This sent the Germans nuts particularly after their technical department head Erik Möller was blocked.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales’s page said that Wikipedia needs software improvements badly and those who objected were the problem.

However, there is another issue here. The Foundation has a miserable cost/ benefit ratio and for years now has spent millions on software development without producing anything that actually works. The feeling is that the whole operation is held together with the goodwill of its volunteers and the more stupid Foundation managers are seriously hacking them off.

It appears that the EU’s well-meaning right to be forgotten is being used by those who want to re-write history without them.

Geoff Brigham, General Counsel for the the Wikimedia Foundation said he had been getting notes saying that certain links to Wikipedia content would no longer appear in search results served to people in Europe. Among the articles removed from search results are an image of a young man playing a guitar, a page about the former criminal Gerry Hutch, anda page about the Italian gangster Renato Vallanzasca.

As of July 18, Google has received more than 91,000 removal requests involving more than 328,000 links; of these, more than half of the URLs processed have been removed. More than fifty of these links were to content on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia said that the WMF has created a dedicated page where we will be posting notices about attempts to remove links to Wikimedia under this authority. The Wikimedia projects provide informational, educational, and historic value to the world. Their content should not be hidden from Internet users seeking truthful and relevant information.

Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales said the EU’s “right to be forgotten” laws where being used to censor history.

“History is a human right and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another,” he said. “I’ve been in the public eye for quite some time. Some people say good things, some people say bad things … that’s history, and I would never use any kind of legal process like to try to suppress it.”

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has made a "substantial" investment in The People's Operator (TPO). TPO is a London-based mobile provider that pays 10 percent of revenue to good causes. Wales thinks the idea has legs and wants to take the idea to the United States and other markets.

In a statement, Wales said TPO had pulled off the difficult feat of creating an inspirational business that had solid commercial foundations. He said that while the idea was to generate massive sums of money for good causes the numbers and looked at the business model all worked.

TPO is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which means it relies on an existing operator's network. In the UK this is EE, the British joint venture between France's Orange and Deutsche Telekom. It launched a pay-as-you-go operation in November 2012 and followed in April 2013 with a contract offering unlimited voice, mobile and data for 14.99 pounds ($24.61) a month. Ten percent of revenue is directed to any good cause chosen by the customer and the company pledges to pay 25 percent of its profits to charity.

None of that is relevant as the company is unprofitable. However, it does not spend huge sums on marketing and relies on word-of-mouth and promotion by the organizations it helps. Wales said he would help TPO expand internationally, starting with the United States. He will be co-chairman of the company.

In response to an onslaught of anti-piracy legislation under consideration in Washington DC, Wikipedia has announced that it will shut down for 24 hours, beginning midnight Tuesday, January 18, 2012, to protest what it claims are severe threats to the openness of the Web.

The threats in question are the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, two online piracy bills that have received plenty of US media attention over the past few months. The decision to blackout the site was based on a vote by 1,800 Wikipedia users. However, the blackout will only cover the English-language version of the site.

Wikipedia, a crowd-sourced, online repository of knowledge, currently sees roughly 16 million active daily users on its site as of January 2012. The English-language version of the site currently hosts roughly 3,848,642 articles as of January 17, 2012.

According to Wikipedia, the Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill that "would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for ten such infringements within six months. The bill also gives immnity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement."

The Protect IP Act, also known in the US Senate as S. 968, is a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to "rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods."

Critics of the legislation, including ourselves, say the legislation could hurt the information technology industry and would raise security concerns pertaining to corporate cybersecurity, domain access rights and may challenge intellectual property rights by creating unbalanced leverage among corporations and copyright holders.

"If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States," the Wikimedia foundation said. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said this morning that he hopes the site blackout "will melt phone systems in Washington."

The Wikimedia Foundation's official statement regarding the blackout can be found here.

The boss of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has threatened a 'strike' where the entire English-language site would be turned off as a protest against an anti-piracy bill currently under discussion in the US. Writing on his bog, Wales said he was planning a global strike of at least the English Wikipedia would put the maximum pressure on the US government.

The 'strike' is in response to the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is currently before the House Judiciary Committee. The Stop Online Piracy Act is an attempt by puppets of Big Content to sacrifice huge chunks of the US Constitution in a bid to get campaign funds to be re-elected.

It would mean that Big Content can accuse anyone of piracy and they can be punished without that nasty expensive process of going to court. Sites such as Wikipedia, where content can be published by any user, will be shut down the moment that anything that Big Content says belongs to it is posted. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said that any service that hosts user generated content is going to be under enormous pressure to actively monitor and filter that content.

In Italy, Wikipedia took down almost the entire site in response to a law that would have made it a criminal offence to publish the results of police wire taps. A few months ago, the Italian Wikipedia community made a decision to blank all of Italian Wikipedia for a short period in order to protest a law which would infringe on their editorial independence.

Wales thinks that the Italian Parliament backed down immediately, although we do not think it was anything to do with a strike. More the fact that they did not wanted to be identified too closely with Big Content when Silvio Berlusconi was about to go under, Berlusconi is the King of Italy's media and has been involved in copyright battles against YouTube and Google.

Wikipedia has been forced to shut down the Italian version of its website because the Italian Government requires posts to be “corrected” if the poster finds them offensive within 48 hours. So if you run a post which says Berlusconi can't walk on water, he can order you to change it and if you don't within 48 hours you are in trouble.

The law does not require a judge to decide if the content is inaccurate only if a politician or B list celebrity finds themselves insulted. If Berlusconi is found guilty of shagging under-age prostitutes and Wikipedia included it in his biography he could order it taken down, even if it was true.

By pulling out of Italy, Wikipedia is warning its readers against the risks arising from leaving to the arbitrary will of any party to enforce the alleged protection of its image and its reputation. “Under such provisions, web users would be most probably led to cease dealing with certain topics or people, just to "avoid troubles"”.

We hate to say it, because Berlusconi is wrong here, but it is hypocrisy for Wikipedia to bleat about this law when it censor's entries on the basis of its ill-informed cabal of editors who think they have power to decide who is interesting or not.

A top French author has admitted cutting and pasting chunks of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia into his books.

But, according to the Independent, Michel Houellebecq insists half inching things like the description of mating flies was not plagiarism. Houellebecq said that it could be an experimental form of literature. "Even a form of "beauty".

The writer was apparently furious when the French press waded into him for lifting passages of his latest book from Wikipedia.fr. They argued that Houellebecq, should know better as he is the most successful French novelist outside France.

Houellebecq does not deny that that he did nick technical descriptions from the anonymous compilers of Wikipedia. A couple of passages in his acclaimed new novel La Carte et le Territoire were lifted verbatim. They include a description of how flies have sex.

He said that his whole style was based on borrowing banal and technical descriptions from everyday life and weaving them into something artistic. Houellebecq said that if people really think that this is plagiarism, they haven't got the first notion of what literature is.

Using real documents and fiction, has been used by many authors. He was influenced by Georges Perec and Jorge Luis Borges. Houellebecq told a radio interviewer that taking passages word for word was not stealing so long as the motives were to recycle them for artistic purposes. "I hope that this contributes to the beauty of my books, using this kind of material," he said.

Quite how an article which was probably edited by a fake penis expert, or someone who faked their doctorate, could be considered beauty is anyone's guess. Still the ability of Wackipedia to make people who it does not think are important disappear would make a good detective novel.

Houellebecq has been accused of racism, sexism and obscenity. This last book La Carte et le Territoire was acclaimed as a "work of genius" by the French newspaper Libération.